NACO's cutting edge: Dear Life leads the way into a new form of musical presentation

In January, the talented young Canadian composer Zosha di Castri was called by the National Arts Centre and offered a commission.

She was pretty darn busy with other commissions, a teaching job at Columbia University in New York and, most important, she was days away from the birth of her first child.

But the fact that the result would be Dear Life, the most ambitious commissioned work undertaken by the National Arts Centre Orchestra, was too good to pass up.

Di Castri’s 25-minute-long score will have pride of place in the first concert led by Alexander Shelley as NACO’s seventh music director. The piece is based on a short story by Alice Munro.

At about $200,000, Dear Life sets a record for the staging of a single piece of new music. It required an appeal to the NAC’s donors who, once they understood the complex project, anted up led by Ottawa’s Dasha Shenkman.

This image by Larry Towell will be part of the Dear Life experience. Courtesy Larry Towell, Magnum Photos.

It will feature massive screens that will host pictures by legendary Canadian photographer Larry Towell. A text, prepared by Kingston writer Merilyn Simonds, distilling Munro’s 10,000-word story into about 500 words, has been recorded by the Canadian actor Martha Henry. The avant-garde Montreal production company Turbine has designed a visual environment that will literally envelop the NACO players and the audience.

The production is led by Shelley and producer and creative director Donna Feore, best known for her work on the Stratford Festival stage, Broadway and in films such as Mean Girls. She will also be directing three other new works for the NAC this season.

New work is chancy. But this piece, because of the cost and the intricacy of its moving parts, is riskier. Will people like it? Will it go smoothly? That will be determined on Sept. 16. But for the music director, Dear Life is the essence of his vision for NACO.

“I wanted it to be an unambiguous statement,” says Shelley. “A national arts centre has to be that place where creative artists have a home, where they can take risks.”

Zosha di Castri was pregnant with her first child when she was offered the commission to compose Dear Life.

New music “is incredibly exciting and important for audiences,” says Shelley. “Great composers were always reinventing the sound heard in a concert hall. An audience may love what they hear or they may find it challenging … but it might also remind them to re-engage with earlier masterpieces.

“I am absolutely aware of the risk. … We will do tons of standard repertoire. But I really believe taking risks is part of the remit.”

That said, he adds that “this is not a kamikaze mission.” Ergo: the first program will include pieces from Mahler and Elgar.

Dear Life was born during internal NAC discussions about what it means to be Canadian, Shelley says.

“You can’t really answer that, but you can talk about it.”

After his appointment was announced in March 2014, Shelley read the Munro story as part of his Canadian education. He told the NAC team that there was something in the story that “to a Brit, seemed quintessentially Canadian.” The next step was a no-brainer. Munro was contacted and she approved. In the fall of 2014, the creative team’s first members were assembled.

Shelley says the audience will undergo a total sensory experience. There is something “filmic about what you will see and hear. There are distorted sounds and scrapings.” And to help that along, the acoustics of Southam Hall are being improved.

“You can’t move a mountain over night. All you can do is believe in something, do it as well as you can and communicate the idea well.

“These new works will be our calling card nationally and internationally. We have had to think about how we tour these things. These works are portable. During the sesquicentennial (in 2017), I want to take these works to other Canadian centres.”

***

Merilyn Simonds has burnished Alice Munro’s story into a 500-word text.

Merilyn Simonds was sitting beside NDP leader Tom Mulcair on the Southam Hall stage, eating her dinner during the annual NAC Gala a year ago, when a stranger knelt down and offered her a job. He was Christopher Deacon, the managing director of NACO and executive producer of Dear Life.

Simonds was also on familiar ground. She knows a lot about Alice Munro’s work and even knows Munro, although she is not a close friend. She took the opportunity “to visit Alice and to talk to her about that story. We spent a wonderful afternoon.”

After the conversation, Simonds settled to her task.

“I read it dozens, if not hundreds, of times.” She is also working on an essay for a book by Cambridge University Press, which is coming out early in 2016 called Where Do You Think You Are: Place in Alice Munro’s Stories. So she knows and has recentlyread Munro’s entire canon.

“In fact, I was coming up to Dear Life at that point. So I came with a deep understanding of her work.”

She also researched the symphonic form to develop a rise and fall and a structure that would be useful to the composer. But the words are not going to be put to music. They exist separate from, but supportive of the music, Simonds says.

“We were all in virgin territory here,” Simonds says. “It’s a bit like film. When you adapt a book for film, you can’t tell the whole story. I was trying to find the story within Dear Life, which was the burnished core, one that would keep the voice, keep the structure and keep the primary elements.

“I only use Alice Munro’s words, but I didn’t always use the phrases in the order she presented them, so the story moves through time in a slightly different way.

“It was a stunningly challenging project.”

Coincidentally, Simonds’ own book The Convict Lover is being adapted for the stage by the playwright Judith Thompson.

“I’m the one whose work is getting the treatment.”

***

Zosha di Castri is a fast writer. “I like mulling on things for a long time,” she does say. But once she puts note to paper, it moves along.

That’s a helpful trait considering she came late to the Dear Life project. “This is a big project to take on in that amount of time,” she says.

But the project was too good to pass up and, nine months later, she has finished a 25-minute piece of modern music. The last chunk was handed in Aug. 15.

With baby Leonora by her side, and Alice Munro’s words echoing in her head, she wrote it as one continuous work. “It is not divided into movements.

“There are passages that will sound familiar to people used to listening to tonal music. There are passages that are more textural, that set an atmosphere rather than having a clear melody and accompaniment. I also experiment with writing micro-tonal music where the intervals are smaller than we would find on a piano. That adds another layer of depth to the sound palette of the orchestra.

“We have so many sounds to choose from nowadays, I think it expands the expressive possibilities of what you can do with an orchestra with so many different families of instruments.

“I think you should just use what you have at your disposal. Of course that doesn’t mean you litter in techniques for the sake of having them. These are chosen with intention both in relation to the text.”

She says the NACO players have been willing, open and excited about the challenge of doing something different.

“I was really excited by rehearsals because of that.”

The story itself was a constant inspiration, she says. “Every time I would read it, there would be something new.”

Di Castri composes with a computer program called LogicPro. It allows her to play with sounds and notes and hear the resulting mix immediately. She sometimes took to the piano. And she had to integrate a song (based on a poem in the story and to be sung live by soprano Erin Wall).

“Imagine music on a spectrum,” Di Castri says. “Sometimes it will be absolute music, sometimes it will be more static and reflective. Other times I try to reference music that we maybe would have heard, music from our collective unconscious.” As the story goes back and forth in time, so does the music.

There will be a quotation of hymns filtered through time, evocative of an old recording, she says, with fuzz and little pops.

The hardest thing: “Getting it done on time. Finding a way to work with everybody, so the project could move forward. Showing things before they were complete. It was a bit like showing people your messy bedroom.”

Alexander Shelley and Donna Feore.

***

Safe to say, nothing on Donna Feore’s extensive resumé is quite like Dear Life.

She says she’s done “multimedia before — but to this extent and, for what I would call a multi-discipline piece — it is unique, even on the world stage.”

Feore will produce and direct four commissions for NACO this season. She, and her actor husband, Colm, have worked with NACO before.

“I was asked to do a concert of Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn. Alexander conducted and I directed.” Colm played all the parts — Puck, Titania, Oberon.

In the Mendelssohn, she put Colm in the middle of the players “to make them think outside the box. They were really receptive.” In a way, she was testing them before Dear Life.

In October 2014, she started work. Dear Life, she concluded right away, had to be multi-discipline.

Munro, she says, is “the most honest writer I have ever read. That’s the starting point. You know there can be no BS because we have a writer who will hold us all accountable.

“From there, this entire project is about artists inspiring artists. It’s challenging. … So I have asked every single one of these people to go outside their comfort zone.”

To get those artists, Feore pulled out her Rolodex and started calling in favours. To Martha Henry, whom she knows well, “I said ‘Hey, Martha, you know you can’t say no. Alice wants you to do it’.”

Feore then started to conceive the look. She began, where she usually does, at the dining-room table with everything spread out, and asked herself, “What’s the visual?”

This a three-dimensional world without the funny glasses. The images will appear everywhere — on 60-foot screens and even on the baffles that sit in the Southam Hall ceiling.

In the beginning though, the “visual” was hanging on her wall.

“We collect black-and-white photography and we have a photo that we purchased from Larry Towell. He has shot beautiful books on southwestern Ontario, the world of Dear Life and Alice Munro.

“Everybody I asked to come on board jumped because we are all looking for ways to work together to collaborate. It is the future. The project is stretching all of these artists and making us think.”

Feore then hired Turbine, a Montreal production design company, which “took the photos and created their own narrative.”

“People say that when they go to a symphony performance they sit and close their eyes,” she says, but Feore is having none of that. “Nobody gets to go to sleep on this bad boy. Not a chance.

“We are storytellers. It is a theatrical event because it is in a theatre. But it’s not just about bums in seats, I want people to be curious and interested. I think we need to offer something provocative.”

At the NAC, new work needs to succeed.

“I feel I have to always be reminded that this is what we are doing,” says Feore. “New is hard. We just have to keep reminding ourselves that this is what we said we would do. Trust the mission.”

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